“What To Bake And How To Bake It” is a beautiful book. Written and designed with the novice baker in mind, each recipe is broken into easy to follow, well photographed, steps. Due to the nature of this book I thought it would be better to have it tested by novice bakers. So, I enlisted the help of my two teenage daughters, both have previous experience, but are far from experienced bakers. They picked recipes that interested them and baked them on their own, with only the occasional question for me. Everything they produced turned out properly and tasted wonderful.

The selection of recipes is good and every one we tried came out with tons of flavor. Some cookbook authors seem to hold back on the spice and flavor in their recipes to not overwhelm who ever maybe recreating them, but this can not be said of this book and its author. There were so much lemon, ginger, chocolate and spices I had a hard time finding room in my kitchen for all the ingredients. While no cookbook can ever be truly original, this one contains many recipes that are unique enough that I have never seen there duplicate. And I have to mention the Lemon Mascarpone frosting from the Zucchini Poppy Seed Cupcake recipe. It is so crazy simple, yet so delicious, that I am kicking myself for not having thought of it myself. It alone made the purchase of this book worth it to me. We still have a few recipes we haven't tried, but I have no doubt every recipe in this book will get tried at least once.

The only thing my daughters or I had problems with in this cookbook was the wording of a few of the recipes. There were a few that told you to hold on to part of an ingredient for later use that were not clear, in the steps that followed, where that ingredient was to be used. Period. That is all I have for negatives.

Great cookbook. If you have a budding pastry chef in your life this is a great choice to get them going. If you don’t, buy it anyway, the recipes are fun. 9 out of 10